Objections board: Candidate can run in district where he is building home

Sitting legislator filed residency challenge against opponent whose house in district was incomplete

John Whitmer's attorney, Richard Macias, uses an electronic tablet to show Rep. Joe Edwards pictures of the interior of the house Whitmer is building. Whitmer said the house has running water and should be complete by the end of June.

Lt. Gov. Jeff Colyer scrolls through pictures of the interior of John Whitmer's new home while Secretary of State Kris Kobach and Deputy Attorney General John Campbell look on. The three officials denied a complaint by Rep. Joe Edwards, R-Haysville.

Rep. Joe Edwards, R-Haysville, makes his case to the State Objections Board. Edwards said John Whitmer couldn't file to run from the home Whitmer was building because it didn't yet have an occupancy permit from the city of Wichita.

The State Objections Board ruled Thursday that a candidate may run for Kansas House while still building a home in that district, the second such ruling in two years.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, Lt. Gov. Jeff Colyer and Deputy Attorney General John Campbell ruled unanimously that John Whitmer, living in an incompleted house that he began building last year, may run in the 93rd District Republican primary against Rep. Joe Edwards, R-Haysville.

The case stirred echoes of 2012, when a gay-rights group challenged Rep. Jan Pauls because she had filed from a church that she and her husband were remodeling.

"This would be a second case where even though the city ordinance may or may not be being complied with, the fact that the person is demonstrating that intent and is actually residing there has been sufficient to meet state law," Kobach said after Thursday's hearing.

Edwards lodged a complaint centered on the fact that Whitmer's house in the 93rd District hadn’t yet received a certificate of occupancy from a Wichita city agency. Edwards repeatedly questioned Whitmer's ethics during the objections board meeting, saying Whitmer violated city ordinance by living in the 93rd District home without the permit and violated state election law by declaring it as his primary residence.

Kobach and Campbell both said they could see Edwards' point at the city level, but city ordinances don’t supercede state election law, for which residency centers on the places potential candidates have "adopted" as their homes and to which they have an "intention to return."

"The statute is very permissive," Kobach said.

Kobach said if legislators wished to, they could "certainly tighten up our residency requirement."

"Every two years we have objections filed and frequently there are objections of this nature where someone is in the process of a move," Kobach said. "There's often an intense controversy about a particular case but then usually the Legislature forgets about it and no one bothers to modify our residency law."

During the previous legislative session, Edwards introduced a bill requiring a minimum of two years’ residency in the district before a Kansan could run for office, but it didn’t get out of committee.

Whitmer said neither the city nor his builder had told him he couldn’t live in the residence without the permit. He said he moved into the new home in April and was spending about six nights a week there. He spends about one night per week with his wife at their previous home in Sedgwick County, he said, which she is preparing to lease.

Whitmer said the new residence has running water and should be complete by the end of June.

"He knows I'm living there," Whitmer said of Edwards.

Whitmer, who said his family has lived in Sedgwick County since the 1800s, is a Wichita businessman whom Gov. Sam Brownback appointed to the Kansas Commission on Peace Officers’ Standards and Training in December 2012.

Edwards' first term was marked by the legislator’s allegation that he was a victim of an assault at Topeka’s Ramada Hotel and Convention Center.

No arrests were made, and The Topeka Capital-Journal subsequently reported that someone with the same name — George F. Edwards II — and date of birth was brought up on charges related to soliciting a prostitute in 1997 in Sedgwick County.

Edwards said he wasn’t that man.

During the 2012 election cycle several residency complaints came up following redistricting. The Kansas Equality Coalition objected to the candidacy of Pauls, one of the authors of the state's gay marriage ban. The objections board denied the complaint, and Pauls narrowly won re-election. She recently switched from a Democrat to a Republican and is running for re-election again.

Also in 2012, an Atchison landlord challenged the candidacy of John Gotts, a man living in Idaho who was serving as a volunteer social media consultant for the Kansas Republican Party. The landlord said Gotts stopped paying rent after the first month and never turned on the utilities at the apartment he listed as his residence for purposes of running for the Kansas House.

Gotts, who was involved in legal proceedings in Idaho, dropped out of the race before the objections board could hear the complaint.